A Politics of the Unspeakable: The Differend of Israel

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

The Right to Participation of Minorities and Irish Travellers

The idea of participation is becoming increasingly important in international human rights law and recent political and constitutional theory. There is an emerging international law right of minorities to participate in public life. There are many problems though with putting this right into practice. It is not enough to offer formal opportunities for representation or even to facilitate more participatory processes. This article explores how participation is more easily proclaimed than practised by examining the position of one ethnic minority, Travellers, in a liberal democracy, Ireland. While there are many formal opportunities for participation, these do not necessarily result in effective participation on a basis of equality, and may still result in decisions which fail to consider the Traveller culture and identity. Travellers still suffer from an imbalance of power in these arrangements. There are hopeful avenues to pursue in improving participation, the role of civil society and the use of a dialogue between non-governmental organisations and international organisations to put pressure on a national government, including special representation to offset the disadvantages of traditional representative democracy and emphasising the role of special parliamentary bodies; and the need to address the politics of recognition so as to strengthen the hand of disadvantaged groups such as Travellers.

‘Together for Health’? How EU Governance of Health Undermines Active Biological Citizenship

This paper explores the potential for active biological citizenship in the discursive space opened by the Community law rights to receive cross-border health care services. By focusing on the European Patients’ Forum and the European Public Health Association as examples of actors facilitated by the European Union, the paper notes how this space might provide some opportunities for patients’ strategic engagement, but also how EU governance discourse is shaping and undermining the potential for activism.

Journal article: Children and Religion under Article 14 UNCRC: A Critical Analysis

This article examines the text of Article 14 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 and the work of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. It considers the text of the article and its travaux préparatoires; it then provides an analysis of the issues considered by the Committee: the concept of the evolving capacities of the child, freedom of religious choice, freedom of manifestation, and education. It also highlights the problems that have emerged in the Committee’s work, in the light of a theoretical framework of the right of the child to religious freedom in international law. It concludes that the Committee fails children in relation to their religion and suggests some positive steps to be taken by the Committee.

On How to Build a Positive Understanding of the Child’s Right to Freedom of Expression

This article looks at the child’s right to freedom of expression under UN treaties. It defines the legal basis, the scope and the extent of the child’s right and it compares it with the adult’s right to freedom of expression. It argues that freedom of expression has both a developmental and an autonomy aspect, and that Article 12 UNCRC does a better job at encapsulating the child’s right than Article 13. It concludes that the child’s right is very much based on the positive obligations of the state, to the difference of traditional international law on freedom of expression.

Cosmopolitan Exception

There has been a resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism in contemporary political theory, based upon the hopeful premise that it heralds an ameliorative response to the malignity of sovereignty's lack and the treacherous violence of sovereignty's excess. The promise of cosmopolitanism inheres in the claim that state sovereignty is and should be supplemented by an international system backed by the legitimacy of international law, grounded in the sovereignty of human rights. Drawing upon Foucault and Agamben, my argument in this essay is that the laudable endeavour of liberal cosmopolitans is flawed in two ways: first, cosmopolitanism cannot escape sovereign violence, because it cannot escape sovereignty; and second, cosmopolitans misconstrue the composition of the very sovereignty they aim to escape. This means that cosmopolitan theorists are unable to identify cosmopolitan practices of sovereignty that also entail forms of violence: cosmopolitan exception. Cosmopolitan exception denotes violent sovereign practices that cannot be differentiated from the protection of rights.